Puffbox

I got some bad news yesterday. Last week, I took an urgent call from a colleague working in central government; a new (but quite large) public sector organisation (which I won’t name) was in desperate need of a new CMS-driven website, but its long-term solution was still months away. Was there anything I could suggest? And could they have it by the end of September? Red rag to a bull… 🙂

Within a couple of days, we had put together a proposal to build the whole thing in WordPress MU (multi user). In many respects it’s the logical extension of much of my recent work and thinking. ‘Press releases’ is just a blog. ‘FOI disclosure log’ is just a blog. Want to keep stakeholders informed of activity on your project, or in your department? That’ll be a blog, plus a few static ‘pages’ forming a pseudo-primary nav. And so it goes on. Plus of course, all the inherent goodness of a blogging system – built-in search,sidebar widgets, subject tagging, RSS, comments if you’re feeling brave. The price? Only just into five figures.

It was genius. Design, development and deployment measured in (literally) days, rather than months. And if you’re prepared to apply the ‘near enough is good enough’ rule, everyone gets what they’re most eager for.

It got rejected, ostensibly because it was too ‘out there’. I’m reminded of President Kennedy’s inspiring words about the 1960s space programme:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

How many organisations do you know which are happy with the big, ugly content management system they spent hundreds of thousands (or indeed, millions) on? Not many, I’ll bet. Yet we keep doing and re-doing it. Meanwhile, millions of bloggers prove how much you can do with an open-source tool, a few community-derived plugins, and a genuine desire to communicate.

So I’m afraid, despite Jeremy’s upbeat comments about Thursday’s government heads of e-communication meeting, I’m feeling a bit depressed this morning. To be in with a chance of meeting the deadline, I had to start before getting the go-ahead – so that’s a few days’ hard work largely wasted. I know I’m going to look at whatever they end up with, and know it could have been so much more. I’m worried that it’s easier to sell a £100,000 product than it is to sell an identical – or indeed, a better – £10,000 product. I fear we might be in an Emperor’s New Clothes scenario.

If anyone out there is feeling brave, please get in touch while the idea’s still fresh.

I’ve no idea how long it’s been in operation… but I’m delighted to see that the OPSI website allows you to ‘subscribe to searches’ via RSS. Sadly the results aren’t especially helpful – generally we’re talking a procedural title and a brutal description, and it’s individual pages rather than assembled publications. But hey, it’s a start.

Worth a look at the work Google Australia have done on their own Google-product-powered election site: mashed-up maps, YouTube videos, Google Earth layers, and all that. More detail in this posting on Google’s Aussie blog.

They’ve clearly gone to a lot of trouble with the map’s boundary definitions; and I like the way you can filter seats by party and marginality, although the usability could be better. Hint: select at least one party and marginality, and look for greyed-out / non-greyed out party logos. I’m also very impressed to see the official Aussie term for an extremely marginal seat: ‘tight as’.

I’m working up a proposal to do something truly radical with a Whitehall website. Given the impossibly tight timescale, the only approach is to adapt some existing (open source) software… and inevitably, my first thought is WordPress. But hang on… WordPress is all about blogs, and its interface uses words like ‘blog’, ‘post’, ‘comment’, ‘trackback’. These are scary, unknown terms to those who have never dabbled; and they’re enough to put many a public sector person into an early grave.

Then it strikes me. There is one way we could replace all the scary jargon with something a bit more Civil Servant friendly: create a foreign language translation from English to Civil Servant. WordPress has the necessary functionality, and the tools are free. It isn’t a trivial task, with literally hundreds of system messages to review and potentially ‘translate’, but I’m certainly considering it.

Ever wondered why there are so few RSS feeds around Whitehall? I discovered today that several major departments have actually been offered the option of having RSS feeds, but have so far declined.

GNN is the Government News Network – a rather grand title for the relatively small centralised team, based at COI, which sends out press releases on behalf of most government press offices. They also have an online service, whereby they will provide an ‘online press office’, rather than individual departments having a ‘news’ area on their own website. The term ‘white label’ is used, although since there’s a huge GNN logo on each page, I’d say ‘cobranded’ was more appropriate. Some examples: DH, MOD, DBERR, DFT.

As an additional service, GNN will also create an RSS feed. But so far, as I understand it, none of their clients have chosen to pay the (nominal) extra fee for this. Surprisingly, I’m told none of them have seen any value in having it. I can only assume this is because they haven’t actually tried using RSS themselves. Maybe if someone told them they could have instant alerts as soon as the BBC website published a story which mentioned any of their ministers, it might be a different story.

Time to unveil my latest project. Professor Sir Ara (now Lord) Darzi, one of the country’s leading surgeons, was one of Gordon Brown’s ‘government of all the talents’ appointments: he’s been charged with drawing up a vision for the future of the NHS. Yes, it’s another wide-ranging consultation / review process. But to the Department of Health’s great credit, they are very serious about it being driven by NHS staff, and they’re using all the modern tools of engagement to make it a reality.

So over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been building a new web/microsite for them – Our NHS, Our Future. It will be a hub for news about the review’s progress, along with access to supporting documentation and all that. And although you won’t find the word anywhere, it’s being driven by a blogging engine (specifically, Typepad). I’m encouraging the Review Team to keep a steady supply of content going, ideally an item every day if there’s something worth saying. Comment functionality is ready to go, although it’ll take them some time to get up enough confidence to say ‘OK’.

It had to be visually close to the very 2.0-y new NHS site, whilst adhering wherever possible to the old-school NHS web guidelines: not always easy. It had to work in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari, and after much anguish, it does – better than the main NHS site. I couldn’t do anything that would be too demanding on the Review Team, as resources are tight and experience limited. There are a few rough edges, including a CSS issue with IE7 which I just can’t fix. And although I’m well pleased with a few visual aspects, like the zebra-striped lists, it would probably benefit from a ‘proper’ designer’s input.

Commissioned, designed, built and launched in under three weeks, and for a ridiculously low cost. I’m delighted to have it as proof that you can do a surprisingly good job of content management with a cheap blogging tool, if you work with it rather than against it. Look out for more web-based innovation from the Review Team in due course, some of it pretty ambitious from what I’m hearing.

I’ve managed to get a sight of the proposed ‘new look’ for government’s one-site-to-rule-them-all, Directgov. I’m not sure how widely they’ve been circulated, so you’ll forgive me for not reposting what I’ve seen. But it’s not quite the ‘extreme makeover’ some have described it as.

Directgov, in its current form, makes a very brutal statement about accessibility. Big text, blocky boxes, next to nothing in the way of ‘character’. (The same goes for its Club partner, the Department of Health, incidentally.) But of course, it doesn’t have to be that way: it’s perfectly possible for a ‘pretty’ design to be ‘accessible’. The new screens seem to take that on board, which has to be a good thing. And by adding some extra colour, it (hopefully) kills off the petty criticisms about its arresting orange palette.

New and improved navigation devices are an inevitable part of any redesign exercise. But there’s something curious about the apparent desire to offer ‘new destination pages that are homepages in their own right and will compete with non public sector equivalents for attention’. Hang on – compete? What happened to the Mayo-Steinberg principles?

For what it’s worth, I’ve always liked the Irish approach. CitizensInformation (formerly known as Oasis) is similarly accessibility-first, but it follows through to the content too. There’s no attempt to make it especially pretty or friendly: very much ‘get what you want, and get out’. And I have to say, it really works. Multilingual and personalisable, even including ‘make your own stylesheet’, too.

In the course of this morning’s webchat on the No10 website, David Miliband has promised that his blog will be back. I asked:

The new Foreign Sec’s fondness for new communication methods – blogging, YouTube videos, and so on – is well documented. Restarting his ministerial blog was famously his top priority when he took over at Defra: but there’s been nothing out of FCO so far. Has the more conservative (small ‘c’) atmosphere of the Diplomatic Service changed his view of such transparent, direct channels? How can the FCO, whose centralised methods changed little over the course of centuries, respond to the ‘I can’ society he described earlier this year?

His response:

I promise not! I am completely committed to the idea that diplomacy needs to engage the public as well as diplomatic elite and also to the notion that I need to lead that in the Foreign Office. So the blog will be back, supplemented by other tools for discussion and debate.

David Miliband is doing a live webchat on the Downing Street website on Monday next week. The announcement is worded pretty strangely: it says he’s prepared to talk about ‘any aspects of foreign policy’, before listing a number of ‘examples of topics that can be covered’. Eh? I’ve lodged a question about the conservative, centralised ways of the Foreign Office, and his own fondness for blogs and all that. Interesting to see how he answers it – assuming the No10 vetting operation lets it through. (Jimmy?)

Is open source software a political issue? The Green Party is trying to get it on the agenda, with a call for IT consultancies’ government work to be released as open source, for others to use and improve. ‘This means the problem can be solved once and then implemented everywhere,’ they say, ‘without charging taxpayers again and again for the same thing.’ That’s assuming it worked in the first place… Frankly it makes perfect sense, and with such high-value contracts at stake, you’d have to assume the big consultancies would consider it ‘a price worth paying’. The Greens are also calling for ‘social movements’ to make a ‘commitment not to move to Vista.’ All very well in principle, but the OEM cost of Vista against an open source competitor like Ubuntu is negligible. OpenOffice versus Word/Excel/PPT might be an easier battle to fight.